> be much doubt that if Trotsky had still been in charge the army would have > responded better and quicker to the Nazi invasion. I mean, I doubt that he
> would have purged _35,000_ Red Army officers in 1937-38, as Stalin did. > Hk: In the best tradition of Thurston, Arch Getty et al, I suggest you seriously verify your numbers. By >the bye, you might also check out > Lenin's correspondences with both T & S on the fronts; Mark von > Hagen's history of the Red Army, and "Stalin's Generals Speak".
GL: >Hari, what are the figures from those sources? Note that I said "purged", >not "executed", and here are some supporting sources&
Dear Grant, Thanks for your source sites as below, with some cuts to your original text. i) http://mars.acnet.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/ww2/lectures/purge.html ii) "More than half the Russian officer corps, some 35,000 experienced men, were executed or banished." http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/t/u.htm iii) "All told, 30,000 members of the armed forces were executed. This included fifty per cent of all army officers." http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSpurge.htm iv) [Voice of Russia says] http://www.vor.ru/century/1937.html v) [Even a Marxist-Leninist site says: ] "Young Guard"& 36,898 commanders were dismissed from the ranks of Red Army. ..In January 1, 1940, this commission returned to their posts more than 12,461 commanders, from those 10,700 were formerly dismissed for political reasons and now put back into ranks." http://www.mltranslations.org/Russia/aucpb.htm GL: Except, of course, those prevented from "appealing" by a bullet in the head.
Firstly, I reiterate that my remarks pointing out newer scholarship by Thurston, Arch Getty etc regarded the matter of the pure numbers. Let us first, discuss purely this in the absence of remarks on the politics and history. The latter I submit, are pretty compelling and again, modern scholarship should assist clarification. Thus, in The Red Army & the Great Purges
by Roger R. Reese [In Eds J.Arch Getty Jnr & R.T.Manning Stalinist Terror New Perspectives ; Cambridge 1993; pp.198-214, the overall point is made that there were some problems with prior estimates which ranged up to 50% of the nachalsostova [i.e. military leadership including both officers & political leaders] being purged . One of the primary methodological problems cited by Reese in this stems from the tremendously low estimates of the size of nachalsostav. John Ericson & Robert Conquest estimated the officers corps to number 80,000 and 70,000 respectively, so whereas Ericksons estimates of between 20,000 30,000 men discharged is very near the mark, his estimate of the impact is very far off, as is Conquests estimate of 35,000 arrested officers out of a corps of 70,000. His estimate of a minimum of 20,000 arrested Polit Admin of Red Army (PUR) men is 300% off. Both of these historians considered the majority of victims of the Ezhovshcina to have been arrested, not expelled & discharged, & did not release how quickly & in what large numbers men were rehabilitated. ; Reese Op Cit; p. 201.
I think some of the political dimensions can be read quite clearly, including the ambitions of Conquest Secret Agent. Other historians of the War, who perhaps might be coming at it with a pre-judgment to verify, include these authors whose figures as you see conflate numbers purged with those executed:
And at the peak of its achievement its command structure was torn down, physically destroyed, traumatized by accusations of treason, forced by torture & brain-washing to spread the damage far and wide by implicating others, equally innocent. Stalins purge of the officer corps swept through the upper ranks from Marshall down to Major or below&.. Out of some 40,000 officers (36,761 army & navy) who were arrested, about one third or nearly 15,000 were executed the rest serving sentences of varied lengths and more of them returning to the army, still as officers to fight in the Great Patriotic War. ; Glantz DM & House J: When Titans Clashed How the Red Army Stopped Hitler ; Kansas 1995; p.2-3.
Grant - Your overall figures, & in the later qualification that you added, namely, that purging in this matter did not NECESSARILY equates to killing - puts you about in the right ballpark I suspect. I had made the same equation that so often is made by writers on the period, that dismissal=murder. Moreover, the citation you offer from Nina Andreyevas grouping [I would not accept of her the label ML-ist but that is another story], notes the numbers brought back into the active service. That matter is again closely related to the political context, and I will give my views on that in part 2. However, reverting to the pure number issue, R.W.Thurston [Life & Terror in Stalins Russia 1934-1941 ; Yale 1996] puts the number of
dismissals from the army not including the Air Force 1935-39 , at 28,685 [See Table 122]. He makes the point that: only a minority of discharges among officers were because of arrests. Even of those incarcerated [totting up in Table 6 this comes to 9,579 by my count HK], more than 1400 were reinstated in the infantry alone.. of those imprisoned relatively few ere convicted: 3188 for all the services in 1937-39. A recent military commission that investigated these convictions found that about 10% were justified, thought why this was not specified. This may be another indication that a plot against Stalin did exist.
Thurston Op Cit p. 122-3. Thurston notes higher figures that are cited by some workers, and dismisses them: Older works commonly suggested that 50% of all officers had been purged with most shot. This number greatly exaggerates the number arrested and greatly under-estimating the size of the officer corps.
Ibid; p.124. It is one of Thurstons main points, that as he heads Chapter 7: The Acid Test of Stalinism: Popular Response to World War II
During WWII millions of people in the USSR had the choice of supporting their system or turning against it. .. The Soviet regime was hardly democratic. Nonetheless it appears to have been reasonably grounded, at least in the cities and among young people as it entered the extreme test of WWII ; p.199; 23. This perhaps answers at least part of your questions to me. But it also in my view, needs to be the segue way into a broader aspect of matters what was really going on? At the risk of boring you, I will give you an abbreviated view of some heretical thoughts. ---------------------------------END PART ONE -------------------------------------------